MOSCOW, April 1. /TASS/. The decision made by the world’s largest publishers of science magazines to suspend access for Russian organizations will make 97% of scientific information unavailable to Russian researchers, the vice-president of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Alexey Khokhlov, said on his Telegram channel on Friday.

On Thursday, the world’s largest publishers of science magazines came out with a statement saying that all of their sales and services to Russian research organizations would be paused. Khokhlov said that legal access to the full-text collections of articles published by Elsevier, Springer/Nature, IOP Publishers and others, and also Web of Science and Scopus reference data bases in Russia’s territory would soon be terminated.

"The publishers who signed this statement believe that in this way they punish not scientists but research organizations. This sounds very strange, because the above-mentioned services are used by scientists and not administrators. This statement is a serious challenge because Russia accounts for a tiny 2.5% of the world’s science products. This means that 97.5% of information is blocked. I hope, though, that a proper response to this challenge will be found," Khokhlov said.